Abstract:The main goal of the study is to critically investigate the major elements of the political speeches of the Thai Prime Minister, Gen Prayuth Chan-ocha. Informed by van Dijk's (1997) concept of Political Discourse Analysis, a corpus, composed of 10,672 word types and 325,398 word tokens, was examined for keywords related to the addressor, the addressee, and the political speech itself. The words with the highest relative frequencies were iteratively categorised into themes and a dialogic investigation was conducted on a portion of the original Thai version. The findings reveal that keywords relating to information conveyed by the addressor accounted for 62.86% (N=154) followed by keywords relating to functions of language at 22.04% (N=54). The high frequencies of these words shed light on the justification of the political, economic and social agenda, which were conveyed by the junta government using deontically modalised language. The quantitative and qualitative data analysis also indicate that the English and Thai speeches target different audiences. This discrepancy implicitly reflects an awkward situation where the military government attempts to present a good image to the international community while imposing actual military governance in the country.
The growth of medical tourism has led to a change in the customer base from local to international, presenting a challenge in how to communicate with these potential new patients. In this paper we use the tools of social semiotics and corpus linguistics to analyze two versions of a Thai private hospital website, one from 1998 before the growth of medical tourism and one from 2010 when roughly half of all patients at the hospital were international. The findings show that, although some differences can be attributed to developments in website capabilities, the 2010 website uses several strategies to build social relationships, involve the audience and engender trust with the goal of establishing the hospital’s credibility for an international audience.
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